Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Facebook or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: We are approaching the end of the academic year — my first in the chair’s role — and I’m becoming uncomfortably aware of one aspect of the job I hadn’t anticipated, and which is gradually wearing me down. Twelve months ago, I was known by my faculty colleagues and my students as an intellectual and a teacher; now it seems like I’m primarily a genial bureaucrat. It’s as if, in agreeing to chair my department for a term, I’d checked both my brain and my scholarly ambitions at the door.
Was it something I said? Something I’ve done? Is this “downgrade” in the eyes of my colleagues (and to some degree even my students) inevitable, or is there some kind of reputation-building work I should be doing to remind everyone that I’m still the strong scholar that they hired into this department 15 years ago?
Signed,
Chopped Liver
Dear Chopped,
Well for starters, some of us love chopped liver. If it makes you feel better, fancier, perhaps think of yourself as paté?
I kid because I’ve been there. I fear that, at the end of the day, your description of the chair’s position as a reputational demotion may be correct. But just because that shift in perception is inevitable doesn’t mean it’s permanent.
I’ve certainly suffered that same kind of devaluation, and so has pretty much every department head I’ve ever met. It’s both perverse and pervasive — the notion that the gifts and skills that make one a valued faculty leader, in themselves, bespeak an intellectual deficit. Those who can, pontificate; those who can’t … find classroom space for those who can?
But how does that make any sense? You aren’t going to be named chair, let alone do the job well, unless you’ve succeeded to some degree in the everyday work of a faculty member. There’s no corollary of the Peter principle that suggests that incompetent faculty members are “failed up” into the chair’s role.
Sure, many of us can think of a chair who took on that role because their scholarly or creative work had plateaued. But they had to do the work well enough to get to that plateau or they would have been let go at their third-year review or denied tenure. And there’s nothing inherently contradictory about the two roles: A faculty member who is good at doing research can also be good at leading people. They’re largely independent variables.
It’s long struck me as a funny paradox: Folks outside of higher education (my family, for instance) think of “chair” as an honorific. They would see becoming a department chair as akin to getting a promotion — by way of analogy to military ranks, a chair would be a major, a dean would be a colonel, and a provost, a general. Within academe, however, we simply don’t think the title of chair correlates with prestige; if anything, we think it correlates negatively. The opening sequence of the Netflix series The Chair neatly dramatizes the disparity between the job title and the reality (make sure to watch to the end).
Even aspirants to faculty life have absorbed those prejudices. Across almost two decades of chairing, I expect I’ve shepherded more than 50 job candidates on campus interviews. In all of those years, and all those visits, I can remember three candidates who asked me about my own research — who talked to me as if I were a scholar rather than a middle manager. People still on the threshold of an academic career have already learned to patronize department chairs.
Nowadays, in my work guiding chairs around the country, I certainly hear this complaint quite often. Probably, Chopped, you don’t need me to validate your experience, although that’s what I’m doing. So I’ll aim to answer your more urgent question: What can be done about this thing?
Can you toot your own horn now and then? My mother always told me to do just the opposite, which is why whenever I mention something I’ve achieved, it always feels wrong. But there is such a thing as being too self-effacing.
Chairs don’t have a lot of leeway for self-promotion. The word I most strongly associate with the position is servant: And a servant doesn’t try to impress those he’s committed to serve with his credentials. One of the most important — and on a daily basis the most difficult — things I’ve always tried to do as a chair is to toot the horns of my department’s faculty members, making sure that their most recent triumphs are conveyed to their colleagues, our students, the dean, the provost, and the communications office.
That’s part of the job. But that service is one-way: As chair, you’re conscientious about doing it for them, but it’s not the responsibility of anyone in the department to do it for you. Your good deeds (the scholarly ones, anyway) are done in secret — which we’re told is good for the soul (Matt. 6:1–4), but doesn’t do much for your street cred. And any direct mentioning of your own accomplishments probably won’t be received well.
It seems as if deans are best-positioned to do a little PR for chairs — although I don’t know whether many, or any, deans take that as part of their responsibility. Deans ought to want their department chairs to remain professionally active, and to show through example that serving the department doesn’t mean sacrificing one’s intellectual or artistic ambitions. Deans ought to want chairs to feel valued for the full range of gifts that they bring to the role. If you’re a dean reading this, is that something you could add to your long list of responsibilities? Are there ways you could celebrate the scholarly and artistic, as well as teaching, accomplishments of your chairs, so that they’re neither ignored nor driven to desperate and unseemly acts of self-promotion? Speaking for chairs and former chairs everywhere, I know we’d appreciate it.
Try to get over it. Because I’m a hopeless optimist, I think that quietly, gradually — and with the help of our deans — this tired caricature of chairs as “less than” could be revised. But the realist in me knows it’s not going to happen in my time in the profession, and maybe not in yours. So part of any adjustment to a difficult situation is to recognize it, and then let it go.
If your faculty expect no kind of intellectual productivity from you — well, aren’t they going to be surprised when your new book lands on the college’s website? The look on their faces will be worth all the condescension you’ve suffered while writing it. (Or nearly.)
What that doesn’t account for, of course, is the sense of scholarly isolation that you might experience as chair while pursuing your academic work alone and unnoticed. The only remedy comes from recognizing that your interlocutors, your scholarly peers, are mostly elsewhere — and of course that is true for most scholars, whether or not they lead a department.
When I took my chair’s job here at Pomona College, I negotiated with the dean for research funds that were separate from the department’s — so that I wouldn’t appear to be supporting my own work at my colleagues’ expense. That separate fund allowed me to travel to professional meetings and keep alive the external collegial relationships that are so important to me.
Remember, too — as I emphasized in last month’s column — that there is a constituency on your campus that you can turn to for support: other department chairs. They are entirely invested in your success as a chair and can support the full range of your ambitions without jealousy.
Faculty members often create writing-support groups; why not organize one on your campus for department heads? What if the chairs on your campus, recognizing the critical importance of keeping their scholarly and/or artistic careers flourishing, got together to help one another? A place where chairs tooting their own horns is not only tolerated but encouraged and celebrated? Your faculty needn’t know about what gets discussed there: You could pretend you were learning the finer points of Workday software, or something.
In the end, Chopped, you may just have to get used to being treated by some of your colleagues as paté. At some point, if and when you “return to the faculty,” you will be welcomed back into the fold (assuming you haven’t made too many enemies as chair).
But while you’re in office, loudly insisting on your own importance probably isn’t the best corrective. Instead, is there a way to value the advantage you enjoy as an intellectual underdog — to show how easily you can exceed the very low expectations that have been set for you? And if department chairs keep exceeding expectations when it comes to our scholarly and creative work, how long can our colleagues hold on to their outdated stereotypes about our intellectual chops?
